Did this lose some sharpness due to resizing from 1811 x 777 from 4608 x 3456, or is this the F9 that caused this?
I can't tell if your using AF or if you set the 1/400 F 9 manually.
It certainly does not look like your a tad out of focus as nothing else is more sharp in your image.

Scott Peden wrote:
> Did this lose some sharpness due to resizing from 1811 x 777 from 4608 x 3456, or is this
> the F9 that caused this?
> I can't tell if your using AF or if you set the 1/400 F 9 manually.
> It certainly does not look like your a tad out of focus as nothing else is more sharp in
> your image.
>
It was cropped rather than resized, Scott, the the resulting crop was resized for web. To be honest I'm not sure what has caused the lack of sharpness - I wouldn't have expected diffraction to have caused problems at f/9.0 on a 200mm lens. It was AF and, like you, I think the focusing was pretty much spot on.

I didn't think F 9-11 on my Sigma 150 would do this either, but by the time I get to F11 this is the run of the mill result after massive crop.

Play with your aperture next opportunity, F5.6 might not give all the DOF you want but F 7.1 might, 6.3 worked well a lot of the time.
I use to use the higher F stops since I had all of the available light I needed, but F 6.3-7.1 gave me best results, unless I was in really close, the closer I got the more the higher F stop was usable. 10 feet across the pond, F5.6 yielded fantastic results for me.

Also with the faster F stops you can set your ISO at 250 and once more increase the sharpness, I'd not have thought ISO 400 would do this but it might contribute when your doing a lot of cropping.

Scott Peden wrote:
> Also with the faster F stops you can set your ISO at 250 and once more increase the sharpness,
> I'd not have thought ISO 400 would do this but it might contribute when your doing a lot of cropping.
>

I have reposted a version without sharpening applied. Crop is the same size but positioned fractionally differently.

I think this one is crisper, but if I recall the last image too, it's point of sharpness on the leaf was a tad further back then this image. You'd have to post an unedited version of the original to compare.